The Rockefeller drugs laws were a disaster. They didn’t have any noticeable effect on the pattern of drug use, but they filled up the jails and prisons with a lot of users who eventually caused the early release of some very bad people when prisons became overcrowded. The users came back to society with graduate degrees in burglary and robbery. Stupid, Stupid, Stupid – but you can’t explain that to politicians who want to get “tough on crime” as long as it doesn’t involve increasing taxes.

Drug cases against users are easy to prove: individual+drug=conviction. The prosecutors used them to pad their resumés, especially when reaching the level of a felony was so easy. Felony convictions mean promotions and a shot at higher office. In a more urban setting almost all of the felony convictions in my jurisdiction would have been plead out as misdemeanors with fines and probation, not prison time.

Welcome to the New York Criminal Justice System – except there’s no justice, and only a fool would call it a system.

In ten years I had to twice lock people in a holding cell and order everyone away from them until their lawyer arrived because I really didn’t want them, I wanted the people they knew, but if they kept talking I wouldn’t have an opportunity to deal. It was a facet of the local legal system where I worked, but the prosecutors had a tendency not to make deals if they thought they would get an instant court win. From my stand point, I wanted the dealers, not users. I didn’t have the money or manpower to go to trial with users, who were generally incredibly stupid to get caught.

In short, it’s human nature at work, but not necessarily stupidity other than in that we’ve crimininalized consensual commercial transactions and that’s stupid. If someone just operates automatically according to ethical considerations rather than considering law, the notion of getting arrested because someone stole a weed off your deck just doesn’t pop to the top of one’s head. BTW, same applies to prostitution and other such “victimless crimes”, where you have two parties who make a commercial transaction, both go away from the commercial transaction satisfied, the only “crime” is in the head of some third party who ought to just mind their own f’ing business…

– Badtux the Libertarian Penguin

We’ve stopped teaching them how to think clearly, for one. And probably also has something to do with the ingrained notion–fostered, I might add, by the police and other authorities–that when someone steals something from you or otherwise causes you harm, you call the cops.